We’ve been having some beautiful weather in the Bay Area this summer. And what better time than now to play around with the new updates to the Weather Company Data for IBM Bluemix service available in IBM Bluemix. Formerly known as Insights for Weather, the weather service offers even more endpoints and capabilities.

In the Weather Company for IBM Bluemix Node-RED lab, I show how to use several endpoints: almanac, alerts, forecast, current observations, and time series.

The complete flow can be imported into Node-RED.

To make this demo versatile, I’ve also added the option in the Node-RED flows to return both HTML webpages and the JSON returned from the weather service.

Many of these Weather Company Data API endpoints offer options for both GPS coordinates (latitude/longitude coordinates) and postal codes inputs. I have found that postal codes are easier (and more human-readable) than the GPS coordinates.

During a recent IBM Hack Night around the Weather Company Data APIs, I was inspired with new ideas:

• finding the best vacation location for weather similar to where you live
• mapping and correlating diseases with weather conditions
• getting the weather texted to you before you leave your home in a high-rise building
• finding the best hiking locations

If you’re interested in the same lab, but in Node.js, you can find a Node.js version in my GitHub repo here.